Roderick Bell: I don't see how they can get the votes for that, even among their own party members. The proper challenge is to SCOTUS, which was made, and failed. Surely that decision would take the wind out of the impeachment sails.

Topher K Rock: It seems that turnabout is fair play after all. Kicking people out after the fact is the way the Dems are doing it, so why not give it back to them?

Just days after a mass shooting at a school that took the lives of 17 people-- many children-- CS/HR 157 was passed in the House today in Florida. It "recognizes public health risk created by pornography & acknowledges need for education, prevention, research, & policy change to protect citizens of this state."

Because, of course, they don't have any other public safety concerns right now, right?

Topher K Rock: Well, +Joe Betsill, we do have a problem with the 1st Amendment. Too many people are getting accustomed to violence and sex. The 1st Amendment needs limits. Don't worry, they'll get to violence in media next.

FTA: The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

...

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

...

"In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

The overwhelming majority of Americans were free of anything that resembled coherent liberal or conservative ideologies — indeed, only “about 17 percent of the public could both assign the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ correctly to the parties and say something sensible about what the terms meant.”

I knew I was in a bubble when it came to my obsession fascination with politics, but I didn't realize how much.